As luck would have it, in the past few months I’ve met an earnest young guy who has fallen head over heels in love with fly fishing over the past year or two.
I’m guessing he’s in his early thirties and he cut his fishing teeth bait-casting on the coast and flipping spinner baits on inland waters. He’s soaking up everything fly fishing he can get his hands these days with the enthusiasm of a ten year-old who assumes fly fishing is all there is good in the world.
Every time I see this guy he greets me with a smile and starts peppering me with questions.
He does so despite my protestations I’m simply a redneck from Montana who’s been lucky enough to fish with talented guys and gals long enough that, like a monkey mimicking a child at the zoo, I’ve eventually done what my mentors did and caught fish.
In our most recent conversation he asked what iconic Western river I’d go fish on the ideal day given a chance; he reeled off a list of some of the biggies – the South Fork of the Snake, the Green, the Madison, Gallatin, Big Hole, Beaverhead, Yellowstone and Missouri, the John Day, the Deschutes and the Montana spring creeks. (I guess we have been talking about Montana and the West a lot lately….).
He was a bit surprised when I said that, things being what they are and given the absolutely unfettered option to choose, I’d rather run off and fish some of the unnamed and overlooked small waters around the West.
Like the little unnamed tributary of the Snake in Jackson Hole, 12 to 15 feet wide in all her glory, that produced sixty-plus four to eight inch trout on dead-drifted cased caddis nymphs early one summer morning, stopping like clockwork around 9 after a two hour frenzy.
Or plucky little native cutts, palm-sized or maybe slightly better, that rise to high-floating attractors beneath grass banks on the far upper Gallatin like 10-lb. Missouri River browns devouring one of Galloup’s articulated streamer monsters.
He stopped to process that for a moment and it was easy to see the fly fishing wheels spinning away behind his raised eyebrows.
Torturing yet another metaphor I offered that while the dance of a drift boat down a curvy, fishy western river is a seductive and enticing one, nothing absorbs a fly fisher like picking your way along, up or down a small creek or crick.
You’re no longer a passenger or observer, you become part of the riverscape. The world constricts down to the run in front of you and the pool beyond, the clock stops ticking and the most important question in the universe is whether or not your 7 foot rod will let you reach under those willows over there. Play this one right and your group will be the only one in sight. You’ll even forget about cell phones and day jobs for a while.
Cricks and creeks.
Rediscover your inner child; fish the small water this year.
